An “Ask” for Microsoft—A Global Price List

And yes, I just used ask as a noun (I feel dirty), I wouldn’t do that in any other context, but this one. In reviewing my end of year blog metrics, my number one post from last year was a post that listed the list price of SQL Server. I wrote this post because a) I wanted clicks and b) I knew what a pain it was to find the pricing in Microsoft documents. However, the bigger issue is that to really figure out what a SQL Server cost, you need to go to another site to get Windows pricing, and probably another site to find out what adding System Center to your server might cost.

This post came up because Denny and I were talking the other night, as someone had posted to the Data Platform MVP list asking how much the standalone R Server product cost. We found a table on some Microsoft site:

I’m not sure what math is required to translate “Commercial Software” into a numeric value, but it is definitely a type conversion and those perform terribly. Eventually I found this on an Azure page:

“This image is charged exactly like SQL Server 2016 Enterprise image, but it contains no Database elements and has the core ScaleR and DeployR functionality optimized for Windows environments. For production workloads we recommend that you use a virtual machine size of DS4 or higher.”

This leads me to believe that R Server has the same pricing as SQL Server, but with the documents I have I am not certain of that fact.

What Do I Want?

What I want, is pricing.microsoft.com, a one-stop shop where I can find pricing for all things Microsoft, whether they be Azure, On-Premises, or Software as a Service. At worse it should be one click from the product name to it’s pricing page. Ideally, I’d like it all in a single table, but let’s face it, software pricing can be complex and each product probably needs it’s own page with pricing details.

The other thing that would be really cool, and this is more of an Azure thing, is to have pricing data built-in to the API for deploying solutions. That way I can build pricing based intelligence into my automation code, to rollout cost optimized solutions for Azure.

Anyone else have feature suggestions?

Updated: Jason Hall has a great comment below that I totally forgot about. Oracle has a very good price list (it definitely wins the number of commas award) that is very easy to access. So dear readers in Redmond: Oracle does it, we you should too!

Updated: There is some of this available in Azure. It’s not perfect though. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/mt219004?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396. Amazon just announced enhancements to their version of this service. https://awsinsider.net/articles/2017/01/09/pricing-notifications.aspx